After a furious 3 months (more than 500 code commits), the Ardour team has announced the release of Ardour 3.0 Beta 1. This is the first version of Ardour 3 that has support for OS X (Intel only for now, sorry PPC users), where you will find fully functional AudioUnit instrument support among all the other goodies that Ardour 3 brings. The list below documents the other many changes, including support for Linux native VSTs, an initial new version of Freesound browsing, some shinier new buttons, and a metric ton of bug fixes and improvements.

New Features:

Linux "native" VST support.

Give route groups their own colors.

Allow route groups to color their tracks.

Add option to insert time on all a track's playlists.

Option to glue new markers to bars and beats.

Implement invert selection for MIDI notes.

Add Selection-by-note-range for MIDI notes.

Add session option "MIDI-region-copy-is-fork". If set, all MIDI region copies will be independent from each other; settable via Session->Properties->Misc.

Offer explicit monitoring choices, so that tracks can be forced to monitor their inputs (and more).

Auto-connect new track/bus inputs to physical ports is now the default.

Auto-connect new track/bus outputs to the master bus is now the default.

Experimental, incomplete reimplementation of Freesound browser (part of the import dialog), allowing users to find and use audio from the vast Freesound audio database.

Add option to have track/bus selection linked between the editor and mixer windows.

GUI Changes:

On OS X, switch all use of Control and Alt/Option keys (closer to Apple's standard modifier usage).

New ArdourButton widget, now widely used for buttons that convey state through their visual appearance.

Rearrange the transport bar; items not frequently modified while working (auto-input, time-master) have been moved to Session->Properties or Edit->Preferences.

Use evenly distributed green palette for MIDI notes.

Use standard selection colour (purple) for selected MIDI notes.

Less day-glo panner colours based on audio track colours.

Make meters with different colour parameters actually work.

Fix meter colour gradients (mid and top were swapped).

Fix meter colour range to again have a hard knee at 0dB and twiddle colours so >0dB levels are red and stand out.

Alert the user if a connection is made which causes feedback, and preserve the route graph in the state that it was in before the feedback was introduced. The intent being to simplify the code, reduce the number of areas of code which must consider feedback, and fix a few bugs.

Provide global prelight option (see Edit -> Preferences->Interface).

2 level structure for theme manager window, to help with themeing ArdourButtons.

Fix transparency of selection rectangles (and change color a bit).

Add "active" indicator/control to rows in the editor route list.

Fix insertion of processors at the point at which the processor menu was opened; give a visual cue to indicate where a processor will be inserted.

make return/enter trigger the default action in a variety of dialogs.

Crash Fixes:

Fix crash caused by empty bundles.

Fix a crash with plugins when the processing of a block of audio is split up (e.g. for automation handling).

Fix crash on rename region.

Fix crash when moving end marker after deleting loop range.

Fix crash on "Consolidate Range" on MIDI tracks.

Other Bug fixes:

Fix note snapping so that we snap to the note we're over.

Fix various MIDI keybindings that were lost previously in a regression.

Setup fader for audio/MIDI when its position in the processing chain is altered.

Reconfigure processing chain appropriately when setting up a peak meter.

Update fader curves when xfade length changes.

Fix thinko bug with dragging one of the >1 tabs in the same route group.

Stop session range location being removed on clear-ranges.

Do not move the initial tempo / meter changes at 0 time when inserting time.

Snap new automation points in AutomationRegionViews.

Don't create new regions on clicks on MIDI plugin automation tracks.

Set up ControlUI::combo_map correctly to fix drop-down boxes in generated plugin UIs (#4221). Based on work by jeremybub.

Delete RouteUI immediately on request, rather than in an idle loop.

Don't allow non-movable meter / tempo markers to be dragged.

Don't draw MIDI note horizontal grid lines if they would be less than 3 pixels apart.

Load the tempo map before the locations so that locations can compute their BBT positions correctly.

Clear clicks on locating for a seamless loop so that they don't stop.

Fix default disk_io_chunk_frames for diskstream so that it isn't larger than the default playback buffer size.

Make it possible for undo records to contain details for crossfades that are later deleted.